The viral success of the mobile phone industry, to the point of replacing the wireline phone in increasing numbers of households, brought the attention of the FCC to reinventing the 911 emergency service for the mobile world. This has spawned rapid growth in technologies for interconnecting the untethered – from established giants like Cisco to focused start-ups like Intrado. Intrado’s core corporate focus on E911 shouldn’t obscure the potential for other location-based services and capabilities – what’s the nearest pizza joint to where my car is right now?

“The Cisco Wireless Location Appliance is the industry’s first location solution that simultaneously tracks thousands of devices from directly within the WLAN infrastructure—bringing the power of a cost effective, high-resolution location solution to critical applications such as high-value asset tracking, IT management and location based security.”

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6386/

Intrado provides the core of the nation’s 9-1-1 network and delivers innovative solutions to communications service providers and public safety organizations, including complex data management, network transactions, wireless data services and notification services.

A major academic institution has an ongoing project to compile the empirical evidence for a rising global consciousness. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

“Personal experience is supported by a growing number of good experiments which show that consciousness and intention have subtle but important effects in the world. We know that groups of people sometimes experience a special resonance of feelings and ideas, and recent scientific evidence indicates that effects of coherent group consciousness can be detected with appropriate instruments. The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international collaboration of researchers extending this research to global dimensions via the Internet. The project uses technology and methods designed to record effects of events that stimulate us to integrate as a world-wide consciousness. Examples include the funeral ceremonies of Princess Diana, the first hour of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, and a few minutes around midnight on any New Years Eve.”

“The Global Consciousness Project is an ongoing, long-term experiment, and the results from the instances that have been analyzed thus far show considerable evidence of a correlation between particular events and the data from our network of random event generators. A summary for nearly four years (to May, 2002) shows a highly significant result. It is tempting to draw the conclusion that a true global consciousness is creating the anomalous effects.”

Don’t want to carry a laptop all the time. Don’t even want to carry a PDA (even though it’s your cell phone?) I’m more interested in how I can access the world’s information, but this is how it cuts the other way.

“RFID chips would relieve doctors of having to spend hours searching for the identities of unknown patients and the confusion over unknown patients’ treatment preferences, he said. This would make RFID chips ideal for people who engage in extreme sports and do not carry their wallets, or for people with medical conditions that make them unable to communicate – although Halamka said the latter situation poses ethical dilemmas involving the issue of patient consent.”

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/gps-05zzzo.html

(I found this in FuturEdition from the Arlington Institute (arlingtoninstitute.org)

The promise of personal access to the vast resources of the Internet seems tantalizing when wielding today’s powerful PCs. But for portability, battery life is still limiting. This research may serve to power the increasingly wired yet mobile individual.

“Rome et al have devised a machine that recovers energy that is otherwise wasted. They

have modified a backpack by introducing a vertically moveable weight that

rises about 5 centimeters with each step and then turns a gear as it falls.

This device can be used to recover some of the energy used in carrying

supplies–a load of 38 kilograms produces up to 7 watts of electricity,

Wi Fi technology looks like the most organic source of development of network infrastructure. Like phototropism, the bandwidth grows and develops in the direction of the most interest and need.

The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) has built a communications network using wireless networking equipment. This is essentially the same “WiFi” equipment used in homes and offices, but we put it on rooftops to connect neighbors and form a high-speed community network.

I wasn’t sure where to classify this news item – World Right Now, Network Infrastructure? But perhaps a stitching together of the world’s knowledge by this technology is more about wholeness.

“As part of its effort to make offline information searchable online, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced that it is working with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford as well as The New York Public Library to digitally scan books from their collections so that users worldwide can search them in Google.”

“Plans were announced today to expand the U.S. tsunami detection and warning capabilities as a contribution of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS—the international effort to develop a comprehensive, sustained and integrated Earth observation system. The plan commits a total of $37.5 million over the next two years.”

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2005/s2369.htm

The above announcement followed by a day UNESCO’s announcement of a global system that includes more than U.S. participation. Upon questioning, Bush Administration officials said GEOSS was “compatible” with UNESCO’s approach, but their concern seemed limited to American victims of the tsunami.

“UNESCO is working towards the establishment of a global tsunami warning system that would be operational by June 2007, said UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura. Speaking at a press conference at the Mauritius International Meeting on Small Island Developing States on Wednesday, Mr Matsuura said that assessment missions are already being undertaken to concerned countries as a step towards the creation of the first regional component of the global system, in the Indian Ocean, foreseen for June 2006.”

“The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) has built a communications network using wireless networking equipment. This is essentially the same “WiFi” equipment used in homes and offices, but we put it on rooftops to connect neighbors and form a high-speed community network.”

Environmental activists have always been driven by visions of wholeness. A new flavor of activity called neurogreens seems to more consciously fuse vision with tactics.

Aware of living in the cataclysmatic 21st century, neurogreens want to bring to life an ecoactivist identity which is to be egalitarian

against social precarity and libertarian against digital monopoly, and is to feed upon the experiences and practices of the

Seattle-Genoa-Mumbai movement. Neurogreens look at and absorb latest developments in environmental science, neuroscience, social science, media technology, in order to be able to fight back resolutely and effectively against global war and environmental destruction, both for our sake and our children and grandchildren’s.

Neurosphere

The Neurosphere Institute is a non-profit organization organized around the long-term trend of an interconnected human population. Such interconnection is leveraging technology developments in the Internet, social media, and the emerging Brain Computer Interface (BCI) segment. Metaphorical connections are becoming literal.

Institute President Don Dulchinos is an experienced technology industry executive, and is currently focused on consulting in the BCI industry.